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FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

arstechnica.com

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Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#21

Post by dwyerm »

ndespres wrote: post #6
marpstar wrote: post #2

In my area (Midwest USA), you can only get 100Mbps or more from either A) Cable company. In my case Mediacom. B) Fiber, which is also offered by Mediacom as well as some rural providers to select locations. DSL is barely 20Mbps around here, and you can't even get 10Mbps service in some spots two miles off US 20. As someone who'd like to buy a home in the country, I find this lack of coverage a much bigger issue. Forg…

I didn't realize DSL speeds were even possible above 7.1 Mbps, have things changed? ADSL is (or was) very much dependent on total wire distance and overall copper line quality from the nearest telco switching station. Top speeds were simply not possible above the 2-mile mark and that was pushing it. Rural areas, forget about it.

vDSL is what changed to make the speeds higher, but although it got a little better, it seems like the distances are still pretty limited. I suspect that the DSLAMs have become smaller and cheaper, so that you can push those out of the central office and into smaller cabinets inside neighborhoods, which had the effect of making the distance problem appear to go away.

That still seems to leave truly rural areas out of luck, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#22

Post by ghaff »

freehunter wrote: post #15
randallsquared wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A septic tank also costs acreage that city homes do not typically have available for less than $24,000.

Which is why cities have city water systems, yeah, but anywhere outside of the city, septic and wells just makes more sense.

>anywhere outside of the city

It's not quite that stark. I live in a population ~7K ex-urban town. I have town water. I do have a septic tank although I believe a portion of the town near the center has sewer hookups.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#23

Post by mjevans »

cortesoft wrote: post #11
dsr_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit more than that, but not much more. I changed from 50Mb/s to 1000Mb/s service a few months ago; latency is much the same, which means that when the pipe is not crowded, I really can't tell the difference. (But it's wonderful headroom for large file transfers.)

Well, latency is never going to change, no matter what plan you use. You can't really sell a faster speed of light....

It might actually, mostly due to buffer bloat on some modem stacks.

The anti-buffer bloat stuff from the recent DOCSIS (I forget if it was 3.0 or the one after) are supposed to help a LOT with latency issues. Not as good as fiber but close enough that global distance issues become dominant again.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#24

Post by juliangoldsmith »

LogicX wrote: post #5

Surprisingly, in Myrtle Beach, SC we have multiple high speed providers choices: HTC (as in htcinc.net, a local telco cooperative offering gigabit fiber), or Spectrum, who just minutes ago I heard for the first time that their new default tier in our area is 100mbps. Not sure if they go much hiher though, because a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that…

>a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion.

Are you sure they don't offer that? I live in Charlotte, and that's what I have.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#25

Post by microcolonel »

SteveNuts wrote: post #19
cortesoft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, latency is never going to change, no matter what plan you use. You can't really sell a faster speed of light....

Speed of light isn't the only factor in latency. Quality of the equipment, routing protocols, etc are far more important since those are the things we can actually change.

And sometimes more important than either of those, the choice between directional radio and cable of any kind (fiber or copper).

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#26

Post by bri3d »

microcolonel wrote: post #25
SteveNuts wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed of light isn't the only factor in latency. Quality of the equipment, routing protocols, etc are far more important since those are the things we can actually change.

And sometimes more important than either of those, the choice between directional radio and cable of any kind (fiber or copper).

I strongly suspect that for an average consumer, latency is driven by the TCP stack on every piece of hardware close to the edge (local machine, router, modem, ISP point of presence) to a much higher degree than the transmission medium or backhaul. Consumer internet has a long way to go before it becomes HFT backhaul-grade.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#27

Post by mikeytown2 »

Comcast recently upped my speed from 75/5 to 150/5. My downloads still top out around 40 on non speed testing sites. I’m looking for something else that has better upload speed; I started with 20/5 on Comcast and over the last 5 years the speed has been going up on paper. I have a 32/8 channel modem attached to a ubiquiti gateway on gigabit Ethernet, so the bottleneck is on the Comcast side. Advertised speeds only match reality for a select few sites that are used for speed testing from my experience.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#29

Post by utellme »

mnm1 wrote: post #16

This reminds me of the former Romanian dictator's comment that his people simply just did not need color tv. I didn't think I'd ever see that kind of stupidity from the US Congress and regulators. Busting up monopolies is clearly no longer in fashion.

Сhaushesku considered that people doesn't need a TV at all, so blackouts became usual thing.

By the way, I don't think it's all about monopolies. It's just expenses, companies should invest huge amounts of cash just to reach last mile. Who will take such risks after some company already built infrastructure which you can just double and hope for underbidding your opponents?

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#30

Post by justin66 »

freehunter wrote: post #10
rayiner wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of my county doesn’t even have water and sewer pipes. People just spend the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars needed to build septic systems and wells and accept that is the trade off for living in the country.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Wells and septic systems are so common that I would struggle to believe they're a "trade off". Where I grew up (on well water and a septic tank), people couldn't believe that city folk pay for their water, and what's more, that they pay to have it go down the drain! A septic tank costs ~$5k and will last for 40 years. Over the lifetime of a septic tank, my city water bill will have…

> Where I grew up (on well water and a septic tank), people couldn't believe that city folk pay for their water, and what's more, that they pay to have it go down the drain!

Where I grew up, people with the choice invariably chose "city water" when it was available, and the network of its availability is continuing to expand outward, as quickly as substantial pressure and money from the suburbs and exurbs can make that happen.

I don't know whether the same is true of sewer service.

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